With unusual weather throughout the world, and a lot of rain, I was lucky to be in L.A. visiting a friend. We made a deliberate trip to Lake Balboa to walk around and check out the cherry blossoms. We were not disappointed. Some of the trees were just coming into bloom, others were in full glory.

I live in the middle of suburbia, where scenes such as this do not exist. Good? Bad? Who knows . . . the myriad and mixture of people and activities is so much fun to watch, I could sit here all day, sipping coffee and sneaking a pic or two.

The Canonet QL17 is a nice, solid rangefinder, which has an “A” for automatic, as well as the capability to be manually set in all areas. I shot a roll of Agfa Vista 200, mostly on “A” to see how well it works. Overall, I think I may prefer to set my exposure factors manually as a lot of the images were a bit blurry or soft. I’ve got some film someplace that may be a bit sharper, shot a year or so ago, that I need to find in order to do some comparisons. This was taken in the food area of The Grove in L.A.

Last summer a friend and I visited the Norton-Simon Museum in Los Angeles. Inside is amazing, and the sculpture garden is as well. The brilliant golds of the tree’s flowers and the grasses in the pond caught my eye.

The Japanese Garden on Woodley in Los Angeles is a lovely place to visit, throughout the year. Because one must stay on the paths, it can be difficult to get the images you might imagine, but it never leaves one disappointed.